Congressional hearings on reducing fraudulent federal payments are normally staid affairs, but not when it’s a new subcommittee inspired by an effort to radically reduce the size of the federal government led by the world’s richest man and echoing the name of a Shiba Inu-themed memecoin.
“Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman [Marjorie Taylor] Greene literally showed a dick pic in an Oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well,” Rep. Robert Garcia said at Wednesday’s inaugural hearing of the Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) Subcommittee.
As the California Democrat spoke, an aide held up a poster of Elon Musk in a tuxedo. “This, of course, we know is President Elon Musk,” Garcia said.
The Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subpanel promises to be a congressional front line in the messaging war around the Trump administration’s own DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which has seen a team of government outsiders move to decimate staffing at federal agencies under the direction of billionaire government contractor Musk.
In an interview before the hearing, Garcia told Roll Call that Democrats on the new subcommittee were ready for “a bar fight.”
“It’s important that Democrats come very prepared and ready to kind of match fire with fire, and I think they’re going to bring all sorts of misinformation and attacks and support what Elon Musk is doing and try to scam people out of their hard-earned benefits,” he said about Republicans. “The richest man in the world is in charge of cutting benefits for working-class people. It’s totally ridiculous.”
Trump’s early weeks in office, including DOGE’s attempts to take control of government payment systems and dismiss broad swaths of the federal workforce, have been met with dozens of lawsuits, leading to numerous emergency court-ordered injunctions. At the same time, Musk has repeatedly made claims, without evidence, of uncovering fraud and illegal payments at agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and Treasury Department.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Musk said that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect,” referring to a false claim he spread that USAID had spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza.
On Wednesday, Republicans repeated Musk’s unfounded claims of uncovering billions in fraud, while Democrats asked why he wouldn’t testify before the committee. Last week, Democrats on the Oversight committee attempted to subpoena Musk, but Republicans blocked the motion.
“If you have a serious desire to engage in democracy and transparency, we welcome you to the Oversight Committee. Come and testify in front of the American people under oath, because we want to know what you’re up to,” said subcommittee ranking member Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M.
Wednesday’s hearing was nominally focused on rooting out and blocking improper federal payments and fraud in the government’s roughly $6 trillion annual budget, an issue both parties agreed contributes to the $36 trillion federal debt.
“Let us be brutally honest about how this massive debt came to be in the first place,” said Greene, the subcommittee’s chair, in her opening remarks. “It came from Congress and from elected presidential administrations.”
“I believe enslaving our nation in debt is one of the biggest betrayals against the American people by its own elected government,” the Georgia Republican said. “The American people’s anger over this betrayal is what gave birth to the concept of DOGE. … In fact, DOGE became a major part of President Trump’s campaign, and led to his overwhelming victory in November.”
Exit polls showed that the economy, particularly inflation, was the top concern among Trump voters in 2024. One Washington Post survey of swing-state voters found that 60 percent opposed “laying off half of federal government workers.”
At the hearing, Democrats argued that DOGE wasn’t about reducing fraud or wasteful spending, but a haphazard plan to kneecap the federal government.
If Republicans really cared about cutting the debt, argued Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, the ranking member on the full Oversight Committee, they would take thoughtful steps to implement Government Accountability Office recommendations to improve anti-fraud processes, increase tax enforcement and overhaul the federal government’s computer systems.
“If we want to be serious about it, let’s be serious about it. But the way not to do it is to fire the people in charge of ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse,” the Virginia Democrat said, referring to Trump’s axing, without providing the statutorily mandated notice to Congress, of inspectors general.
“The president of the United States has the prerogative to fire anyone that has overseen $36 trillion in debt enslaving the American people, and rightfully so,” Greene responded.
Greene closed the hearing with a threat to the federal judges who have issued temporary restraining orders against DOGE. “A federal judge … blocked not only DOGE, but the Treasury secretary himself from accessing his own agency’s payment systems. That’s absurd,” she said. “We will hold this judge and others who try to stop the will of the people and their elected leaders accountable.”
While the initial court order limited access to the Treasury’s government payments data to just career employees, the court amended the order on Tuesday to allow Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent access as well.
The post DOGE fight: New subcommittee holds its first House hearing appeared first on Roll Call.
